Oxford Denouement

So this is my last tutorial essay ever, and the one that satisfied me the most. My professor puts check marks nexts to points that I hit particularly spot-on, and I counted 37 this time, which is about 30 more than I usually get, so that made me feel super warm and academically fuzzy. He also said that if I ever wanted a recommendation for grad school, he'd be happy to give me one, and a recommendation from an Oxford professor tends to carry a lot of weight, so while I still have no idea if I want to attend grad school, the possibility of getting in is that much more attainable now. Anywho, point is, I really enjoyed writing this essay, which was sort of the perfect way to end the term. Enjoy.

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Both C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien were the leading experts on medieval literature and mythology in their day, and it is that very study of and appreciation for the literature of the Middle Ages which permeated their own later fiction and was a direct source of their works’ international and trans-generational success. Thus an appreciation of medieval literature enhances our understanding of Lewis and Tolkien's fiction specifically because it reveals each author’s deep familiarity with and use of medieval Christian allegory, mythic fantasy elements, and the structure of the heroic adventure. Through C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, we shall see how the allegory, fantasy, and adventure in the novels all owe themselves to the medieval study of literature each author engaged in prior to becoming world-famous novelists.

Like the Gawain poet, both Lewis and Tolkien used a highly entertaining story to explore the promises of Christian doctrine in contrast to the often bleak or hopeless reality of everyday life. Coming out of a devastating world war, it is not unreasonable to say that both authors were looking for a way to reconcile the God and faith they believed in with the atrocities of genocide, bombings, and the pain of death, illness, and injury, and even the despair or guilt of survival. In Tolkien’s Return of the King, Frodo, after coming home from the “war,” he has completed (with the help of Sam and Gollum) the task he set out to do: namely, the final destruction of the Ring. But he is something like a Holocaust survivor, unable to relate to his former life or share in the joys of the people he left behind who have no frame of reference for the things he has seen and lived through.

While many parallels can be drawn between Lewis and Tolkien’s personal experiences of war and their treatment of war in their stories, the more prevalent parallels are found in the allegory that hides under the surface of their fantastical settings. Since allegory was such a prominent literary device in the middle ages, and since both Lewis and Tolkien spent the majority of their lives immersed in the study of medieval literature, it is no wonder that their own fictions are layered through not only with borrowed dragons and dwarves and treasures of the poems, ballads, and lays they knew so well, but with a strong undertone of Christian allegory, however consciously or unconsciously they structured their narratives with it. They also both pulled specific fantasy elements from a wide range of medieval literary sources, as well as structuring their novels after Beowulf and the adventures in Sir Gawain—i.e., in the form of a quest. Beowulf quested for wealth and glory, Gawain for honor and duty, Frodo specifically to destroy the Ring and generally to save the world, and the children in Narnia to save the land and peoples of Narnia. The allegory, the fantasy, and the adventure all reinforce and strengthen one another on a literary level, and feed from and into one another from a wellspring of medieval sources and inspirations.

It is difficult to come across any adult reader of C. S. Lewis who has not heard that Aslan is a Christ-figure. Knowledge of Lewis’ religion and subsequent academic study has made the Christian allusions almost a given. But the depth and breadth of the allegory in even the first book of the Narnia chronicles is far greater than one might think. The difficulty in understanding Lewis’ allegory, however, comes with the meaning of the word allegory itself. Many critics contest that Lewis was comically or irritatingly ignorant of the fact that his own work held allegorical meaning, as he seems to have plainly stated that it did not in various letters and publications. Others have said that his definition of allegory is completely wrong, or at best, too narrow. What is difficult to perceive, and what many critics seem to miss, is that there are multiple levels and types of allegory. Plain allegory makes one thing stand for another. In the Pearl poem, written by the same author as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the narrator has literally lost a pearl. Allegorically, he has “lost” his young daughter (his “pearl”) to death. On the next level of allegory, he has lost that which the pearl (his daughter) represents: innocence, and the faith that abides so naturally at its side. If the pearl/daughter belongs to the narrator, and he has lost it/her, then he has lost his own innocence and faith. So, too, can Lewis’ works be read in multiple layers or steps.

Leonard F. Wheat argues that there are fifty-two allegorical symbols in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe alone (11). While he asserts the fairly common ideas that the Witch is Satan and the Professor is God (and by association, the Witch’s castle is hell and the Professor’s house is the kingdom of heaven on earth [64]), it is also worthwhile to point out that the White Witch can serve the heroic quest archetype of the final foe, and the Professor can serve as the shaman or guide. While Lewis is drawing on fairly direct biblical parallels, he is also drawing on mythic prototypes from all across ancient heroic literature. Luckily Wheat does not slip into a Freud- or Jungian analysis where the wardrobe is symbol for the womb and rebirth or the Witch is seen as some maternal Oedipal figure of repressed sexual desire: “The wardrobe is simply a story device for getting someone from one world to another—like Alice’s rabbit hole, Dorothy’s Kansas tornado, [or] science fiction and fantasy ‘gates’” (67). Lewis did not study Freud or Jung and therefore while symbols of such a kind may be found, they are merely accidental and bear no relevance to Lewis’ intended effect. Other allegorical parallels permeate the text to such an extent that to name them all would take perhaps an entire book (and indeed, Wheat spends dozens of pages doing just that in his book Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials: a Multiple Allegory: attacking religious superstition in the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and Paradise Lost). To summarize the larger allegorical layers across the span of the book:

LWW’s surface story tells the hidden story of a journey by humans (the four children) who are guided by a minister (Mr. Beaver) to Jesus (Aslan), becoming converts to Christianity in the process, and who then struggle through the quagmire of Christian mythology. The struggle includes battles with Satan, sin and redemption, a savior’s death and resurrection, the harrowing of Hell, Revelation’s apocalypse with its Four Horsemen, and finally salvation—life with god (the Professor) in the earthly Kingdom of God. (Wheat 84)

But allegory is not the only thing Lewis incorporated from his study of medieval literature. It is, at its heart, a children’s fantasy book, in the sense that it is a story written for children constructed of fantastical, other-worldly elements. While Aslan may be a symbol for Christ, he is also a talking lion, and, having been one of the children to whom the story was read, it was his talking (as a lion) rather than his allegorical association with Jesus that held me captive as I lay in bed every night listening. While I have not found any direct antecedents for a talking lion in medieval literature (other than, of course, the image of the lion laying down with the lamb in the Bible), there are a host of other magical creatures that Lewis incorporated: fauns and giants and tree spirits and satyrs and centaurs as well as the evil dwarves and wolves and all manner of evil beings. He also gave the Pevensey children mythical gifts: Peter’s sword (reminiscent of any of a dozen mythical swords, not least of which is Arthur’s sword-in-the-stone) and Lucy’s healing cordial (which could have connections back to potions or the draught of poetry that Odin wins from the dwarves in Norse mythology or any such mythical elixir), to name a few. There is also the wardrobe itself, the magical portal between worlds, like the bridge separating Asgard and Midgard, the fairy mounds leading into the world of faerie, or the boundary between countries in The Knight of the Cart which allows people in but does not allow them to leave. And as in all good heroic adventures, the structure of the story itself follows that of Sir Gawain or Beowulf: the children leave their home for a foreign and fantastic land, face dangers and endure battles and hardships, acquire that which they came for, and return home all the richer (and wiser) for having had the adventure.

Also borrowed is the idea of the hero. But both Lewis and Tolkien take the hero a step further than any of their medieval predecessors. Where the Beowulf poet may very well have regarded the hero as noble and praiseworthy, he viewed him as tragically lacking a personal relationship with God. Therefore, no matter how heroic or good a king he was, there was always a sense of sadness surrounding a hero who was so close to the ideal, and yet so far away. Lewis, in setting his tale in (his) modern time, but also in an alternate world, was free to complete the heroic cycle with a Christian aspect without having to remain explicitly Christian. Where the Beowulf poet lamented his inability to guarantee where Beowulf’s soul would end up, Lewis can allow his children to return back to the real world and the professor will full confidence in their final, eventual resting place. And if the children are heroes on one hand, so too is Aslan. He embodies the greatest ideals of the old medieval (and pagan, pre-medieval) hero: martial valor and kingly responsibility. But where Beowulf and even Sir Gawain would die for honor and glory willingly (and Sir Gawain would even die in defense of the physical safety or honor of a lady), Aslan does die willingly and horrifically, and not for a lady or a fellow warrior, but for someone who in no code or law deserves it: for a traitor; someone despicable in heroic, chivalric, and religious terms. If a progression of the ideal hero were said to begin with the unrealized Gilgamesh and his unchecked martial prowess, on through the selfish and yet communal need for wealth and fame in kings like Beowulf, and even through the chivalric ideal of Arthur and his knights, then the hero is, perhaps, “completed” in the “person” of Aslan: wholly good, wise, and, most importantly, selfless; even to the point of death for the least of his people. A far cry from the violent and sexual rampages of the untamed Gilgamesh.

Tolkien was similarly influenced by his medieval studies, although his allegory is far less apparent and perhaps less intentional or abundant. Where Aslan is the obvious Christ-figure in Narnia, the role of Jesus seems to be split amongst several characters, the most obvious of which is Gandalf, as he is dragged down into “hell” (in the mines of Moria) to fight with the demon-esque Balrog. After this death-and-resurrection-esque scene, he returns, transformed, as Gandalf the White, which carries with it some potent Christ imagery. By turns, however, Jesus can be seen in the temptation and sacrifice of Boromir (he nearly takes the ring, resembling the temptation of Christ in the desert, but resists and then gives his life to protect Frodo, resembling Jesus’ sacrificial death), the reluctant kingship of the ranger Aragorn (in the Garden of Gethsemane Jesus asked for the cup to be taken from him if possible), and the self-sacrifice of Frodo as he alone carried the weight of the ring, a burden which no one else could possibly fathom, or, indeed, endure (just as Jesus carried the weight of his own divinity and knowledge that he must one day die in an extremely painful manner).

Beyond the polymorphous Christ figures, there are a variety of allegorical references. The Mines of Moria can be seen as a sort of hell, or gateway to hell; Sauron is obviously a Satan-figure; the Hobbits can be the meek of the earth as well, perhaps, as the children that Jesus calls to his side (and if we are to take Gandalf as a Jesus figure, it is no coincidence that he loves spending time with the Hobbits and finds something innocent in them that he cannot find in any other race); the orcs can be seen either as pure demons or as the unnatural offspring of fallen angels (i.e. the Nephalim or giants or the Old Testament) since they are “birthed” from mucous-sacs from the bodies of fallen elves; Mt. Doom can be seen as either another hell or as the Christian idea of the “refining fire” through which men must be purged or destroyed (here Frodo fails and gives in to the temptation of the ring, but Sam is found perpetually stalwart); as well as countless others. In his essay in the book J.R.R. Tolkien and His Literary Resonances: Views of Middle Earth, Charles W. Nelson suggests that each particular race represents one of the seven deadly sins: dwarves stand for greed, men for pride, elves for envy, ents for sloth, hobbits for gluttony, Wormtongue for lechery, and orcs for anger (84), but this reading seems far too simple on one hand and blatant on the other—Tolkien tended toward subtlety in his religious allusions rather than predetermined and obvious object-for-object symbolism (i.e. “men are Pride personified, hobbits are Gluttony).

While the allegorical allusions are slightly more difficult to point to with any definite conclusion, the mythical elements are far easier to trace back to their sources. Stuart D. Lee and Elizabeth Solopova highlight many of the origins of Tolkien’s fantasy creatures and objects in The Keys of Middle-Earth: Discovering Medieval Literature Through the Fiction of J. R. R. Tolkien. His dwarves hail back to the Voluspa (60), many of the names—including that of Gandalf (meaning “staff elf”)—come from old Nordic genealogies (65), and even the idea that names can “reflect the personality of their bearers” comes from Old English poetry (51) and are present in the title and adjacent personality of nearly every character in Lord of the Rings. They also point out that Tolkien pulls material from Sir Orfeo (the Elves at Rivendell), The Ruin (Legolas’ “Lament of the Stones”), The Fight at Finnsburg (The Fight at Balin’s Tomb), the Pearl (The Crossing of Nimrodel), Beowulf (Boromir’s Death and the Rohirrim), Maxims II (Treebeard’s List), The Battle of Maldon and Homily on the Maccabees (the Death of Theodon and the Arrival of the Mumakil), Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (the Landscape of Mordor), and finally, The Seafarer (the Final Journey [Lee, Solopova; table of contents]), and these only scratch the surface of the corpus of literature Tolkien had available to him to fashion his Middle-earth (Midgard, perhaps?). They even suggest that Tolkien “presents us with a mythology that could explain why our medieval ancestors believed in elves, dwarves and dragons (to pick but a few examples)” (10).

Where much of the Christian allegory rides fairly close to the surface in Lewis’ work, Tolkien’s is a bit harder to find. And it is possibly for very good reason. Like his predecessors, Tolkien wanted to tell both a captivating story and a story that dealt with the intricacies of the Christian faith. As George Clarks says:

Following his creative predecessor [the Beowulf poet], Tolkien set LR in what can be seen as a time before the Incarnation, possibly even in the time of the patriarchs, yet the wiser characters in LR, as in Beowulf and some of the sagas, are aware of the presence of a force they cannot name (40).

Especially coming out of the Second World War, “The hero and the heroism Tolkien sought were meant to justify the ways of a hidden God to a world that felt the power of evil” (Clark 39). But to justify that hidden God, Tolkien could not use the inadequate hero of medieval myth. Like Lewis, the structure of his stories mimicked the heroic adventure of the literary Middle Ages. While The Hobbit is fairly light-hearted, with the heroes actively seeking adventure and volunteering for the quest of gold and fame (highly similar to tales like Beowulf, and, by association, similar to that type of hero), the Lord of the Rings trilogy features a host of reluctant heroes, a quest of destruction (of the ring) rather than acquisition, and a defensive rather than offensive battle strategy. And for these altered circumstances, an altered hero is required. As Clark says, “Tolkien knew and loved the literature that preserved the heroic ethos of the old Germanic world, but he could not accept the heroic vision of man’s fate or the traditional heroes represented in those literatures. His fantasy fiction rewrites heroic literature and the hero” (40).

Just as the allegorical role of Christ can be found in the multiple figures of Gandalf, Aragorn, and Frodo, so too can the role of hero be distributed among them. But if we are to look for the new, idealized hero—Tolkien’s Middle-Earth equivalent to Aslan—then we might be better to look beyond the three obvious protagonists to a much-overlooked Hobbit by the name of Samwise Gamgee. If Aslan is wholly good, wholly wise, and wholly selfless, then Sam is his closest Middle-Earth parallel. Gandalf, Aragorn, Elrond, and Galadriel—while authoritative, magically and/or martially powerful, and wise—all recognize the inescapable fact that they are not selfless enough to endure the temptation the ring offers them, powerful as they are. They are not Aslans, though they appear to be at first glance. Neither, entirely, is Frodo. He comes very close, but it must be remembered that it is Sam, not Frodo, who never once entertains the idea of using the ring for his own purposes. It is Sam who is stalwart, faithful, and selfless to the bitter end. While the Beowulfs and Gawains and Gandalfs have wonderful, fame-accruing battles and quests, it is Sam who quietly plods on through miserable, dull footpaths, cooking meals, gathering water, and keeping Frodo safe and fed and warm. He is not handsome or articulate or exceptional in any way except for his extreme loyalty and humility. But if the ideal hero is Aslan, and if Aslan is allegorically Christ, then Sam is, in an odd way, perhaps both the closest Jesus parallel as well as the most “ideal” hero in the trilogy. While Jesus in many ways lived an exciting life performing miracles and traveling and speaking to large crowds, he was neither attractive nor politically or martially powerful. He did not fight in battles or accrue self-glory or wealth. He constantly put himself in a subservient position to the least of the people around him. These are all qualities Sam carries with him from beginning to end. Aslan does not change from beginning to end: he is as he is, as is Jesus. In many ways, Sam, too, remains essentially himself from the start of the quest to its conclusion.

While it is true that “Tolkien sought a true hero motivated by a heroic ideal consistent with his own religious and moral ideals…he could not rid himself of his desire for the glorious heroes of old” (39) as George Clark says in J.R.R. Tolkien and His Literary Resonances: Views of Middle Earth. And while Tolkien did have those types of medievally-inspired heroes throughout his tale (even Frodo gets to fight every now and then), he also included a hero who was “better” than they; a hero absent of ambition. And it was this hero who was instrumental in getting the ring-bearer to Mt. Doom. Without Sam, Frodo would have failed. Without Sam, Middle-Earth would have fallen. In the end, Frodo could not overcome the temptation of the ring, and Gandalf, Elrond, Galadriel, and Aragorn, while valiant and willing to face death, are not the ones who turn the tide of battle.

But while Tolkien needed a new hero to complement his bevy of traditional heroes, he did not, in the end, abandon the medieval sources in his quest for Christian revision. As Solopova and Lee point out, even the fact that Frodo fails in the end, is a throwback to Gawain failing in his quest (27). Both of them very nearly succeed and only make small transgressions (or, in Frodo’s case, a larger transgression, but only at the end of a very long time of not giving in to temptation). Both of them are punished slightly for it—Gawain with a nick on the neck and Frodo with a missing finger—and both return to their homes disquieted and unable to adopt their former peace of mind. At the end of the quest, Frodo, Gawain, and even the narrator of the Pearl continue on knowing that good has triumphed over evil, but at immeasurable personal cost. Gawain says that he would rather die than live with the shame, the Pearl narrator laments that he cannot be with his pearl (i.e. dead and in heaven), and Frodo goes off into the Undying Lands (a sort of afterlife).

In both Lord of the Rings and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, there is a sense of bittersweet victory. The heroes have been changed by the quest, forever. And having loved and fought for Narnia, having realized a dark truth at Mt. Doom, life can never be the same, for better or for worse. If the children in Lewis’ story are allegorically supposed to return to the Professor’s house as Christians, it is not to a completely happy, idyllic life that they return. If anything, now fully understanding the truth of their religion (the truth of Aslan, the truth of Narnia and good and evil and sin and betrayal and war), they are bound to that knowledge, and bound to the responsibility that comes with it, and with the completion of that knowledge is the understanding that they cannot return either to Narnia or to their life before Narnia. Frodo, having come face-to-face with his own fallibility and inherent darkness, cannot simply life live in the same innocent, care-free manner that he once enjoyed.

Thus, as Christians and as students of medieval literature, both Lewis and Tolkien chose to structure and model their stories from the medieval sources they had available to them, and thus it is through an understanding of those sources that we come to a better understanding of the works of two of the most influential fiction writers of the modern age.

Works Cited

Evans, Jonathan, Roger C. Schlobin, and Charles W. Nelson. J.R.R. Tolkien and His Literary Resonances: Views of Middle-earth. Ed. George Clark and Daniel Timmons. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2000. Print.

Lee, Stuart D., and Elizabeth Solopova. The Keys of Middle-earth: Discovering Medieval Literature through the Fiction of J.R.R. Tolkien. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Print.

Powell, Barry B. Classical Myth. New York [u.a.: Pearson Longman, 2009. Print.

Wheat, Leonard F. Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials--a Multiple Allegory: Attacking Religious Superstition in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and Paradise Lost. Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 2008. Print.